Are you attending VMworld 2019 in San Francisco, CA? If so, I invite you to add Bitdefender to your MUST SEE list of vendors.

With so many vendors exhibiting at VMworld, how do you know which booths to visit and who to get on your busy schedule? Easy -- Bitdefender. VMblog has been following Bitdefender for many years now, visiting with them at trade shows like Citrix Synergy and VMworld, and always walking away impressed after learning something new. The company is a global cybersecurity leader, protecting over 500 million systems across 150 countries. And you are going to want to visit them and check out their GravityZone Security technologies for sure!

Read this exclusive pre-show interview with Bitdefender to learn what they have planned for the upcoming VMworld 2019 event.

VMblog: How does your company and product fit within the VMware ecosystem?

Bitdefender: As a VMware Elite Partner, we have been closely collaborating over the years to bring our award-winning security capabilities to a variety of VMware environments-from vSphere and VMware Cloud on AWS to Horizon and NSX-T-while fostering management integration with the underlying platforms to drastically simplify security administration. Our VMware Ready-certified cloud-workload protection platform GravityZone offers VMware customers a single point of security management for their entire hybrid-cloud estate, providing single-pane-of-glass visibility and ensuring security policy consistency across clouds. GravityZone helps VMware users solve the security vs. operational efficiency and infrastructure performance dilemma by maximizing protection, automating security management, and increasing ROI on VMware infrastructure.

VMblog: We've had the pleasure of connecting at VMworld over the last several years as Bitdefender has been a long-time show sponsor. What keeps you coming back?

Bitdefender: We value our ongoing partnership with VMware, and their likeminded commitment to innovation and relentless customer focus. VMworld is a great time to network, and to connect with customers to discuss their latest challenges and how we can help address them.

VMblog: Tell us about your booth setup and VMworld sponsorship. What are your plans for this year's show?

Bitdefender: Bitdefender is a Silver Sponsor and will be at booth #1727 this year. We will be showcasing GravityZone, our award-winning VMware Ready cloud-workload security platform, and two major innovations designed specifically for VMware customers: next-generation agentless security for NSX-T Data Center and security for VMware Cloud on AWS. We will also make an exciting announcement with VMware at the event, so stay tuned!

This year, we are honored to have two VMware guest speakers in our booth: Geoff Wilmington, Sr. Technical Product Manager, NSBU, and Neeharika Palaka, Manager, Business Operations - Cloud Services who will be discussing VMware NSX-T Data Center and VMware Cloud, respectively.

Additionally, on Wednesday, August 28th at 2:50 pm Andrei Florescu, Director of Product Management, and Dan Leming, IT Manager at our valued customer Tyler Technologies will deliver a joint presentation "Streamlining Growth with Efficient Cybersecurity" at the Solution Exchange Theater.

We're once again welcoming magician and presenter Ken Newman, who tells the story of cybersecurity through magic. We'll have demonstrations and hourly presentations at the booth, prizes, and a daily raffle to win a Bitdefender BOX.

Bitdefender: To set the stage, I would like to quote our valued customer, Tyler Technologies on the problems our cloud-workload protection platform GravityZone has helped them solve: "GravityZone outperformed on all fronts-minimal CPU usage, exceptional threat detection, and streamlined administration. We also like that GravityZone is an end-to-end security suite and integrates well with our large VMware environment."

GravityZone supports VDI and server workloads running in a variety of VMware environments-from vSphere and VMware Cloud on AWS to Horizon and NSX-T. In fact, GravityZone is the only security solution on the market that fortifies NSX-based agentless security with tunable machine learning.

GravityZone protects all enterprise workloads using a single management console that natively integrates with vCenter Server and NSX Manager. This enables rapid roll-out of security services, security-workflow automation and simplified day-to-day administration, cutting time spent on security from days to hours every week. With GravityZone, IT operations teams can focus on customers and strategic IT projects rather than on managing security.

Another valued Bitdefender customer, Mentor, a Siemens business said of their experience: "We have four virtualization people managing Bitdefender across 15,000 VMs. They're not even the security experts. That's how easy it is to use Bitdefender."

Top Infrastructure ROI, Performance and End-User Experience

Engineered for virtualized and cloud environments, GravityZone minimizes security's impact on infrastructure resources, increasing consolidation ratios by up to 55% and improving application response by 36% compared to other security solutions.

Bitdefender: GravityZone excels on several fronts including enabling consistent security and single-pane-of-glass manageability across the hybrid cloud, reducing security's impact on infrastructure performance and end-user experience, and bringing next-generation technologies to the data center.

By delivering a single-console solution covering multiple virtualized and cloud environments, GravityZone provides the visibility, policy-enforcement uniformity and consolidated reporting that are unachievable with other solutions. In VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS, for example, GravityZone automatically applies consistent, VM-appropriate policies based on vCenter Server inventory objects, including both on-premises and VMC on AWS instances.

Security's impact on infrastructure utilization and performance is an important concern as it directly affects costs and end-user experience. GravityZone fills this gap by offloading antimalware overhead to a virtual appliance and using proprietary two-layer caching techniques and heuristics to minimize the amount of CPU, memory and other resources required to run security. These approaches help customers increase VM density by up to 55% and reduce latency by up to 36% compared to other solutions.

VMblog: What is your number one message to both VMworld attendees and those who won't be able to make the show this year?

Bitdefender: Regardless of what VMware workloads you run and where you run them, Bitdefender GravityZone delivers the most effective protection, while freeing up your IT and infrastructure resources to run strategic projects and revenue-generating workloads.

VMblog: Can you talk a bit about the future of cloud and virtualization? Where do you think the industry is headed?

Bitdefender: It has become clear over the last several years that despite the explosive growth in public-cloud IaaS adoption, enterprise computing will remain hybrid for the foreseeable future. For example, Forrester® reports in its "Adoption Profile: Public Cloud In North America, Q2 2018" that 84% of public-cloud users also have a private cloud. From the strategic, economic, and privacy points of view, hybrid makes sense for the enterprise. Among the plethora of internal and customer-facing applications that large enterprises run, there will always be some that are better suited for private, some for public, and some for migrating across clouds at various stages of their lifecycle.

Multi-cloud is the new emerging trend in enterprise infrastructure, with most organizations planning or deploying several public and / or private clouds. The 2019 RightScale State of the Cloud Report shows, for example, that 84% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy and, on average, organizations are using or experimenting with a mind-boggling sum-total of 4.9 clouds. This creates complexity both from the infrastructure-management and security standpoints. Our focus at Bitdefender has been to support customers as they embrace the multi-cloud world. Our cloud-workload protection platform, GravityZone, has been engineered to provide single-pane-of-glass visibility into all clouds an enterprise runs, enabling efficient and consistent enforcement of security policies-whether servers or virtual desktops operate in private or public clouds or migrate between them.

David Marshall has been involved in the technology industry for over 19 years, and he's been working with virtualization software since 1999. He was able to become an industry expert in virtualization by becoming a pioneer in that field - one of the few people in the industry allowed to work with Alpha stage server virtualization software from industry leaders: VMware (ESX Server), Connectix and Microsoft (Virtual Server).

Through the years, he has invented, marketed and helped launch a number of successful virtualization software companies and products. David holds a BS degree in Finance, an Information Technology Certification, and a number of vendor certifications from Microsoft, CompTia and others. He's also co-authored two published books: "VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center" and "Advanced Server Virtualization: VMware and Microsoft Platforms in the Virtual Data Center" and acted as technical editor for two popular Virtualization "For Dummies" books. With his remaining spare time, David founded and operates one of the oldest independent virtualization news blogs, VMblog.com. And co-founded CloudCow.com, a publication dedicated to Cloud Computing. Starting in 2009 and continuing all the way to 2016, David has been honored with the vExpert distinction by VMware for his virtualization evangelism.

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vmworld through the years | Infographic

VMworld is the premiere virtualization and cloud computing event held every year by VMware going back to 2004 when it kicked things off in San Diego. This year, the show returns to San Francisco after a three year run in Las Vegas.

Come along as VMblog takes you on a tour of VMworld through the years, rock and roll style. View the City and Attendance play bill. View the VMworld Set List. Find out how many Keynotes were hosted by which CEO. What about the bands who have played over the years? Check out the key updates made during each VMworld event and the tag lines used over the years. And find out which vendors you should be adding to your must see list at VMworld 2019.

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